The New Stuff

It's A Bird...It's A Plane...It's Foreskin Man

The life of comic books and the – for lack of a better term – idiosyncratic little community that keeps the comic culture alive, have delivered plenty of superheros who posses powers that may or may not be hard to wrap your mind around dependent upon your own bulls**t limit. Peculiar as they have been... this one takes the Eisner Award (basically the equivalent of getting an Oscar in the comic book world... and yes, I had to look that up!)

Clad in a tight blue and yellow outfit with muscles galore sporting the number one superhero accoutrement – a cape... he appears to be your average crime stopper. However, Foreskin Man typicality halts right there. This guy's nemeses include “doctors who practice circumcision and Orthodox Jews who support the religious ritual.” Hmm... sounds like a dick move.

But why them? Well you may recall late last year when San Diego activist Matthew Hess pushed for a “national effort to outlaw circumcision, [which] led to a measure on San Francisco's ballot in November that would make it illegal in the city to perform a circumcision on a boy younger than 18.” Hence, the birth of Foreskin Man that Hess said he conceived last year as well in order to help boost that effort. Yeah Hess... because that's what every kid wants for their 18th birthday. Hell, they don't even want to hear about it by time they're 18... let alone go through it.

Unfortunately for Hess, the only thing some apposing groups want to see 'chopped off' is Foreskin Man. According to the Detroit Free Press, “the series has drawn criticism from those who deride Hess' imagery as anti-Semitic and liken Foreskin Man's confrontation with a sinister-looking Monster Mohel to 1930s Nazi propaganda.”

That's an extreme accusation you might say. Well boys and girls, you be the judge. The report states that “in the comic's second issue, the mohel (a specialist in Jewish ritual circumcision) [depicted with a hook nose and claws] barges into a San Diego home, snatches a baby boy from his mother and proceeds to circumcise the infant on a pool table before being stopped by Foreskin Man.”

Hess is also the guy who coined 'MGM' which stands for male genital mutilation. For years, opposing sides regarding this skintastic debate have had the following views. On the one side, it is argued by the medical community that hygiene is improved when the boy's foreskin is removed and that it “would be a flagrant violation of constitutional rights,” especially given the religious aspect for Jews. On the flip side, supporters of the ban claim it simply “amounts to male genital mutilation.”

In the end (or the tip), this is a matter that should most definitely be left up to the family and should always remain their personal decision... not the state's. And finally, am I the only one that would like to see the kind of butcher job Hess got years ago which most likely launched this ridiculous vendetta against phallic blades?